To be or not to be... able

Whenever the subject of the influence of the mind in our actions comes around I always end up with a split heart: on the one hand, there are the obvious physical limitation that make it some quests simply impossible regardless of the amount of willpower and effort that you throw at it; on the other, there are plenty of well documented stories of people performing incredible feats thanks to the power of their minds. So the determining the division between the things that we can and cannot do is not that simple.

Let me start by taking a step back at the concept itself of being able to do something. The nature of the expression is a prediction of the future and, as we all know, predicting the future is hard. Even in the most deterministic environments, such as the action of gravity (if I let go of this pencil, it will fall to the floor) there are situations where the prediction might fail (the pencil could be magnetic or be glued to your hand, a strong wind might blow upwards, etc.). Notably, abilities do not happen (or at least they are irrelevant) in the past: the things that you did were done, and the ones you did not, were not done, even if you could have done it. So the question of the ability is whether you will do it in the future or not (we will ignore for now the deterministic approach, which believes that our future is already fixed, and follow the free-will line of thought).

Photo: ClauAppl2a

The prediction about out future ability to do something can be based on two different factors: extrapolation of the past or projection of the future. The first method leans on past events and relies on the assumption that the situation is not going to change significantly in the time frame of the prediction, so if you did it in the past it is very likely that you will be able to do it again in the future. Furthermore, the closer the future, the less likely the conditions will change and therefore the higher the chance that you will be able to repeat the feat. If you have been writing with a fountain pen for years, you can extrapolate that you will be able to do so in the future, at least as long as nothing happens to your hand or your brain to the contrary. Of course, the longer the statistics of past successes, the more credible is the prediction: if you have written twenty novels, almost anyone will trust you to be able to write another one in the future, but if you have written only one the hopes will be different.

The other mechanism happens to be much less reliable, because it is based on projections. When the activity in question has never been done by that person before, we start to use analogies that are not very evident: if someone has prepared a bean stew it seems credible that they will be able to cook a lentil stew, because the dishes are very similar and the preparation steps are the same on both cases just with different ingredients. But having cooked a stew does not qualify you to prepare a completely different dish, like beef Wellington, where a whole different set of techniques have to be used. Sometimes it is not easy to determine if the difference is qualitative or just quantitative. If you have regularly run five miles and consider running a marathon (slightly over 26 miles) it is not clear if this is just "more of the same" or the accumulation can make such a big difference that the challenge will be substantially different. Still, the most difficult part of predicting the abilities is the human factor, including the influence of the mind.

When it comes to predicting if someone will be able to do something that they have not done before, one key aspect is that each tasks requires a number of required factors to go well enough to enable the success, because in most cases any one of them can derail the project if it goes sufficiently bad. Hard tasks are those which require many factors to be within in a very narrow tolerance, where as easy ones either depend on less elements, or the tolerance is huge, or both. For instance, grabbing a ball from the floor is very easy, because you just have to identify the position and even that not very precisely; if the ball is rolling, then you have to coordinate position and time on the floor; throw it in the air and you have to consider the height as well; and if you ware juggling three balls in the air the number of things that can go wrong is very high, and the task is really hard. That is when training becomes necessary to narrow the variability of your movements: if you can repeat them reliably (i.e. if you have done so in the recent pass and can extrapolate that it will be the same in the future) they are not a source of error anymore and the number of things that can go wrong diminishes, so the task becomes easier.

An then comes the motivation factor: I have mentioned before how the number of runners that manage to complete the marathon slightly below 3.5 hours and slightly below 4 hours is noticeably higher than those who finish slightly above those mental milestones. This can be traced to the fact that those are headed to miss the milestone by a little bit manage to push themselves harder in the last stretch (even if they think they were already at their limit). The data shows that those runners are more likely to improve their time in the last two or three miles than those who are "in time" and do not need to push themselves any harder. So it not in question that, under certain circumstances, you can perform better if you just push yourself.

On the other hand many professional athletes try to work in the opposite direction: since the training is aimed at improving the repeatability and the muscle memory, thinking can be very damaging because it can lead them to override well honed automatism that are essential to the success. I remember an interview with Olympic medalist Shawn Johnson, where she said that she "trained like she was at the Olympics, and competed like she was in training", because while in training you can afford to push yourself beyond the limit to learn new tricks, when you are in a competition your best chance is to let the body do what it has been trained to do.

I came to think about this today because yesterday evening I had the weekly video call with my mother and my brother Jack (David could not join) and she was very proud about how at age 72 she had not flinched when she found some technical difficulties trying to pay for some hobby courses that she intended to start at the community center, and eventually managed to turn in the properly filled digital form at her bank. My brother praised her success and instead focused on asking about that new hobby of hers. When she mentioned that she was not making any progress with the previous one and that she had decided to change I could not help bu smile wryly at the fact that she had showed persistence in not wanting to be persistent.

On my side, I have to admit that I do not know myself to be able to make accurate predictions: some days I feel like I will be able to write two blog entries to build up some margin, but barely make the first one; other days I do not believe I will be able to pull out anything readable, but once I sit down to do it, it does not come bad at all, and even fast. In the end, I can only second Kate Sanborn's quote (falsely attributed to Thomas A. Edison) that "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". In the end, if inspiration does not catch you working it could as well not have happened.